


A Strange Weight to Bear

by ossapher



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen, spoilers for the finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 20:51:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6581653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ossapher/pseuds/ossapher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scene from S6E13, "The Promise." Raylan and Loretta have a long-awaited conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Strange Weight to Bear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> A wedding present for the fantastic scioscribe, with, I hope, as many of her favorite tropes as I could realistically cram in.
> 
> IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FINALE YET, THIS WILL SPOIL LITERALLY EVERYTHING. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

A single gunshot, that’s what Loretta hears as she hides behind the dash of Boon’s pickup truck. She waits until the echoes stop resounding off the hills before raising her head to peek over the dash. She doesn’t see Boon.

She does see Raylan, sprawled unmoving in front of his black Lincoln. Her body goes numb, like poison, like apple pie, like the night her mom passed. Ava Crowder hasn’t stuck her head up yet. Maybe she’s afraid what she’ll see. Loretta’s afraid, too, but that doesn’t stop her opening the door and dropping down to the pavement. If she has a problem-- if Raylan’s dead (and it sure looks that way) and Boon’s alive-- she needs to know it.

When she sees the blood on Boon she realizes: two gunshots, so close together human ears couldn’t know the difference. No telling who shot first.

She kicks Boon’s gun away and lets him die on the road.

***

Three things become apparent in the next minute. One, that Raylan Givens has a whole galaxy of lucky stars he needs to be thanking. Two, that Ava Crowder just might be desperate and insane enough to escape the clinging weeds of Harlan County. Three, that Loretta is here, and Raylan is here, and bleeding copiously from the head, and between the two of them the only vehicle left is Boon’s truck.

Raylan wants to spend some time rolling around on the asphalt and swearing, and Loretta indulges him, because he seems to be having himself a day and because she’d be well-disposed to anyone who shot Boon for her. Eventually, though, he runs out of words, or runs out of hot steam with which to hiss them out, and ends up sitting in the middle of the road, long legs gangling out and a mess of blood crusting his face, his duster, his fingers where he touched the wound.

She steps over to him and feels an uncomfortable frisson. It feels odd to be taller than Raylan Givens; it feels odd to loom over him like she was looming over Boon just now. She holds out her hand, and Raylan takes it, and she walks backwards to drag him up onto his feet. Raylan's is a strange weight to bear, not meant to be carried by others: heavier than she would have guessed, high center of gravity from those goddamn chicken-legs, flat-bottom cowboy boots putting the whole foundation in doubt. She pulls him up fast, feeling from the tension in his hand that if she stops halfway up he'll tip over and crash back on the concrete. He wobbles, once upright, and staggers over to lean against Boon's pickup before casually splattering puke all over the side of the road. She doesn’t take his hand again; she’s not the type to hang on.

"One of the many virtues of ice cream," he opines, "it tastes just as good coming up as it does going down."

"You had ice cream for lunch?" she asks, unimpressed.

"No." Raylan wipes his mouth. Any second now he's gonna start bossing her around. Instead, he squints off into the hills. "How’m I s’posta explain this cavalcade of bullshit?"

By which, Loretta understands, he means: dead Boon, vanished Ava. For a moment the implication that the other white hats don't understand what Raylan is almost makes her chuckle, but a thought gives her pause. _It’s Harlan_ , she thinks. It’s not superstition--not really, not if it’s true. _Pulling him back_. She’s never much wanted to leave, herself, but she understands what happens to those who do.

Raylan might actually be in trouble.

She watches the first fly settle on Boon's corpse, watches the turkey buzzards beginning to circle overhead, and thinks, _I owe the man a favor_.

After all, Harlan’s always liked her.

"Give me your phone,” she says, and to her surprise Raylan obeys without question.

What she does now is going to stick in people’s heads. The white hats aren’t about to believe a word out of Raylan’s mouth. Therefore, Raylan can’t be the one talking. He plays the steely-eyed gunslinger, and he can’t _be_ that, has to be the victim or, failing that, at least convincingly mortal. She may have to testify, which will have the unfortunate side effect that a lot of lawmen will know her name and face. But lawmen are forgetful folks where victims and innocent bystanders are concerned. Raylan, on the other hand: Raylan is one of their own. Now, purely for example, if she killed Raylan, shot him in the back with Boon's pistol right now-- those lawmen would see her face when they closed their eyes. They’d know her, like Boon had known Raylan, as something to be chased to the end.

It occurs to her that that’s how Boyd knows Ava now. No wonder she’s running like she just broke out from Hell.

Loretta scrolls through the contacts until she finds Raylan’s boss. Chief Deputy Art Mullen. She puts the phone on speaker, for Raylan's benefit, and makes the call.

Mullen picks up after a single ring. "Raylan."

Loretta takes a deep breath. She doesn't want to oversell it. For one thing, she's got her pride. "This is Loretta McCready. Put me on speaker."

Silence on the other end of the line-- it stretches several seconds. “You’re on speaker,” Mullen says, his voice careful, an undercurrent of some dark emotion just detectable.

"Then I shall begin by emphasizing to you that Marshal Givens is alive."

She doesn't know how to interpret the next period of silence on the other end of the line, but Raylan, the idiot, starts babbling. "I'm okay, Art, he barely winged me, really--"

"Shut up and let the lady talk, Raylan," Mullen says, and the primary emotion Loretta detects is relief.

“As you’ve gathered,” Loretta says, shooting a glare Raylan’s direction, “Raylan’s been injured in the course of valiantly carrying out his duty as a U.S. Marshal.”

"So what is this, then, a hostage situation?" Mullins says, the weariness in his voice infinite. "If I drop a sack of money down your favorite abandoned mineshaft do I get my marshal back?"

"No," Loretta says, wrinkling her nose. She almost feels sorry for these lawmen, having to chase after dumb, brutal, uncreative people all day--makes them assume all criminals are like that. Classic case of selection bias, really. They’re not working with a representative sample. "I just wanted to let you know I'll be driving him to the hospital now."

"So let me be clear-- you do _not_ want ten million dollars in cash?"

Loretta frowns. Ten million is the kind of money that attracts only trouble. She’s got Mags’ last gift; she’s got enough to grow on and grow with. She doesn’t need any more. Worse, Mullen is thinking of her the wrong way. No question about it that to him, wanting ten million dollars is a sin. "No sir," she says, and, damning her pride, injects a scared little warble into her voice and says, "Raylan just saved my life, so."

There is a very faint sigh from the other side of the line. "And where do I pick up the body?" Boon's still sprawled out on his side, although, she notices, his hat has blown away. "’Round mile marker 27,” she says, and hangs up the phone.

***

Raylan speaks up once, right at the beginning of the drive, when she pulls a U-turn to point them back at Harlan. He says, “Hell, no.”

“We’re only an hour from Harlan.” She feels like she owes the county to at least ask--doesn’t want to give offense. Has to at least pretend she doesn’t already know what Raylan will say. “It’s another two hours to Lexington. You wanna bleed for an hour longer than you have to?”

“If it means staying out of Harlan, I will bleed all over this goddamn truck.”

All proper gestures made, Loretta shrugs and makes another U-turn. “Have it your way, asshole.”

Raylan doesn’t doze in the passenger seat, though she keeps glancing over to-- well, to make sure he hasn’t passed out, she supposes, although there doesn’t seem to be much danger of that. Shot in the head and he’ll probably walk away with a couple stitches. But he does lean back, and stretch his legs, and stare out the window at the hills rolling by. It strikes her that, if he has his way, this will be the last time he ever sees these hills.

Loretta’s stomach twists at the thought of a man tearing himself so violently up by the roots. A little part of Raylan, she knows, thinks of Harlan as Hell. So what does that make her? Best-case scenario, a psychopomp. Charon, maybe, smuggling a soul back across the river in the bottom of his boat, Cerberus snoring back at the great gates--Charon, giving directions, _hurry up the stairs, and whatever you do, don’t look back_...

(Except, if she remembers her Edith Hamilton, they always do look back in the end. Raylan certainly seems like the looking type.)

They pass an exit sign with more than one fast food restaurant. Twenty miles from Lexington, and Loretta decides she’ll be sad to see him go. In spite of all the times she's been uncertain if he’s watching her back or breathing down her neck or just clinging to her-- she’ll be sad to see him go.

The highway gains a lane. More cars on the road now. Raylan’s eyes examine each one carefully, and Loretta knows exactly who he’s looking for. She drums the steering wheel with her fingers. Ten miles from Lexington. No-account suburbs out both windows now, the houses whipping by. She misses the hills already.

Traffic slows a little--the evening rush-- and Raylan sits himself up and begins looking in every window of every car, probably making Lexington’s commuters shit themselves at the sight of his blood-mask face glowering down at them.

“She’s not gonna be there,” Loretta says.

“Bull _shit_ she’s not,” Raylan mutters. “She left almost the same time we did, headed the same direction. We could both be caught in this very same traffic jam.”

Loretta sighs. Raylan keeps looking. He’s squinting something awful, an ugly grimace on his face. She wonders if he’s seeing double.

“Stop that,” Loretta says. She can’t shake the conviction that Raylan is facing some existential threat, something just as dangerous to him, in a way, as Harlan-- or maybe it’s the same danger, reflected, refracted, transformed. “You’ll give yourself eyestrain or... something.”

Raylan doesn’t answer. Traffic continues to crawl forward. Loretta spots the sign for the hospital and signals for her lane change. Raylan’s still looking, still wincing, and this might be the last time she ever sees this idiot, on the highway to Lexington staring into strangers’ cars looking for the woman who made, is making, and probably will continue to make a fool of him.

Loretta grinds her teeth. "Boyd Crowder would chase her," she says. "Boyd Crowder would chase her ‘til the world ends, wouldn't give up ‘til she was his. You're a lot like him, Raylan. Can't let things go.” Harlan makes people that way, maybe by example. Makes them hang on to what they have, to what they don’t have, to what they’ve dreamed of. Harlan grows long weeds with deep roots, and clings tight enough to strangle.

Loretta's seen a lot of things (insults, pleas, threats, an actual bullet) bounce off of Raylan's stupid thick skull, but somehow that seems to stick. He huffs, crosses his arms over his chest, and reaches up to pull the hat down over his eyes, seeming vaguely disconcerted when there’s no hat there.

"While we’re talking,” he says, in a high-and-mighty tone, “Stay away from my relatives' land. I only just bequeathed it to ‘em. Give ‘em some time to settle in."

She slots herself into the exit lane and they peel off from the highway. "I will buy the Givens plot for a fair price, whenever they are willing to sell." At his skeptical look, she says, "I'm no Avery Markham, Raylan"

"No," Raylan agrees at once, "but sometimes I do wonder about you." He sighs. She knows he sees more of Mags in her every time they meet, and the thought makes her sad. She won’t let herself get like Mags got, in the end. She’s not going to kill little girls’ fathers, for one, no matter how quarrelsome and wrongheaded they may be.

"You ever thought of getting out?" Raylan asks, in the silence that follows.

Whatever burden it is he wants to lay down at her feet, she's not about to pick it up. Harlan knows she’s more than what she seems-- Harlan loves her, now; she feels the cling and resists the urge to cling back. One day, though. She’ll grow strong weed with deep roots. One day Harlan will love her like a three-headed dog loves the touch of its master.

"No," Loretta says, and doesn’t explain what Raylan would never understand. She pulls up under the sign for EMERGENCY, even though the emergency’s long over, and clears her throat. "You should be going."

He smiles, or grimaces, his mouth tight. "Well, you’re right about that, Miss McCready.” He opens the door, and steps out of the truck, and she watches him go.


End file.
